


Ich hab die Nacht geträumet

by Island_of_Reil



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Coronation, Deutsch | German, F/F, Folk Music, Pining, Singing, Spoilers for Chapter 69, harvesting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-24
Updated: 2015-05-24
Packaged: 2018-03-31 22:21:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3995152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Island_of_Reil/pseuds/Island_of_Reil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“What could the dream mean?/Oh, beloved, are you dead?”</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ich hab die Nacht geträumet

**Author's Note:**

> This is yet another fill to [this prompt](http://snkkink.dreamwidth.org/13546.html?thread=8612074#cmt8612074) for SnK characters singing traditional songs from our world that have lingered in theirs. I learned of “Ich hab die Nacht geträumet” from [a German commenter on fail_fandomanon](http://fail-fandomanon.dreamwidth.org/99328.html?thread=490222336#cmt490222), who linked to [this 2001 version by the German band Hekate](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zep8ZFcZztM). I have changed the gender of the lover in the song from male ( _Liebster_ ) to female ( _Liebste_ ), and I have based my version of the English translation on [this one](http://lyricstranslate.com/en/ich-hab-die-nacht-getr%C3%A4umet-i-had-dream-last-night.html).
> 
> According to [the German Wikipedia page on this song](http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ich_hab_die_Nacht_getr%C3%A4umet), the rosemary tree symbolizes death: in northern Germany, graves were traditionally planted with rosemary, and some mourners wore rosemary stalks at funerals.

The singing of the women as they bring in the harvest floats over the fields to Bertholdt as he walks down the village’s high road. It stirs something deep down in his chest, the loom of melody he hasn’t heard in more than five years, the warp of old women with their gravelly altos and the weft of young girls with their gossamer sopranos. No song within the Walls — not the marches of the Trainee Legion, not the beer-sodden choruses in the taverns, not the tunes of streetcorner fiddlers trying to scratch out livings in a day when nobody could afford bread, let alone music — has ever affected him the same way.

He and Reiner and Berik used to sing snatches of the reaping-songs as they played, as they trained, not caring that they were almost men and they were singing women’s songs. Later, as they left the village, Bertholdt and Reiner sang a line of them here, a line of them there. Annie never sang at all. Long before Wall Maria loomed into sight, Bertholdt and Reiner had ceased to sing.

Now, as Bertholdt approaches a row of harvesters, he immediately recognizes the brown head that towers over most of the others, the somewhat broader shoulders whose hard muscles shift back and forth under the coarse linen blouse. The arms that wield the scythe are more golden than before, their freckles darker.

Ymir has never caviled at pitching in, he’ll give her that. It’d be incorrect to say the other women _like_ her, with her hacksaw tongue and her sullen air of loss and her disinterest in making sheep eyes at men or cooing over children. But she came home with Bertholdt and Reiner, and she unstintingly lends the village her bodily strength, her skill with patching clothes, her knowledge of herbs, her handiness at snaring small game for the pot. The women accept her.

He wonders what they’d do if he or Reiner ever told them what she did to Berik.

The song the women were singing finishes, and their scythes hiss audibly through the wheat stalks. Old Huld usually leads the singing; Bertholdt waits for her to start a new song, the others to pick up its thread. But the voice that begins again, though also an alto, is young, strong, and bitter.

“Ich hab die Nacht geträumet  
wohl einen schweren Traum…”

_I had a dream last night,  
It was such a terrible dream…_

The other women look up, startled, at Ymir as she sings. Huld recovers first and adds her own voice to Ymir’s.

“Es wuchs in meinem Garten  
ein Rosmarienbaum.”

_Growing in my garden  
Was a rosemary tree._

Several more women join in on the beginning of the next verse.

“Ein Kirchhof war der Garten,  
das Blumenbeet ein Grab…”

_The garden was a graveyard,  
The flowerbed, a grave…_

As the rest of the harvesters come in on the next couplet, so does Bertholdt, out of their earshot, half under his breath, a woman’s song on his lips for the first time since before he brought down the Wall:

“…und von dem grünen Baume  
fiel Kron und Blüte ab.”

_…and from the green tree  
fell the crown of its leaves, and its blossoms._

*

The sound of a woman singing issues from the distant end of the dimly lit corridor. It echoes off walls hung with huge oil portraits of Reisses past; they glare down at Eren as he passes them, challenging his presence in this fortress where human memory is preserved and hoarded. The eyes are uncannily alive in the rushlight, and his gut stirs with a weird foreboding that he forces himself to shake off. He is not, has never been, superstitious. There is nothing to fear, at least for the moment. He prevailed, Historia prevailed, they all prevailed, and within the hour she will be crowned Monarch of the Walls.

In his hands, wrapped in a clean linen, is the crown. Squad Levi was cleaning Rod Reiss’s personal quarters and looking for anything of significance when Jean found it in a cedar box, resting on a velvet cushion. The captain ordered Eren to bring it personally to the Garrison official who will set it on Historia’s head. The Survey Corps does not trust the Wallists to officiate, Rod dead or no.

The circle of metal and stone is surprisingly light in Eren’s hands. He supposes it would have to be, for a king or queen to wear it regularly. He wonders how much food and medicine in Shiganshina, for his family and Armin’s family and his father’s patients, the gold and jewels might have fetched. When he told Armin and Mikasa in private last night that the thing would be put to better use that way, melted down and its pieces distributed, Armin shook his head. “It’s a symbol, Eren. Symbols matter to people,” he said. “Symbols help leaders harness power.”

Eren supposes. But there are symbols, and there are symbols. Some, like wings embroidered on the backs and arms of jackets, do not embody food taken from the mouths of children.

His route to the office claimed by the Garrison staff runs past Historia’s private suite of rooms. In the outermost one, the women who once attended Frieda Reiss and her mother sing songs of romantic love and queenly glory as they paint her half-sister’s face, iron and pomade her hair, and drape her in the robes of office. The finer points of this ritual are unknown to the women of the military. Though the attendants have been carefully vetted for their loyalties, Mikasa and Sasha and a few Garrison women stand silent guard in the dressing room, making sure there are no hairpins dipped in poison, no sharpened nail scissors to be turned against the new Queen.

The door is cracked open to let out the heat of a dozen bodies and the brazier for the hair irons. As Eren approaches it, he picks up the melody. It is a song he knows, a song everybody knows, a song almost always sung by women. The solitary voice is almost childishly high and ethereal, but winding through it is a dark thread of despair.

“Die Blüten tät ich sammeln  
in einem goldnen Krug,”

_The blossoms I did gather  
in a golden jar,_

A second voice, ordinary soprano in pitch and rough around its edges, joins Historia’s. Sasha.

“der fiel mir aus den Händen,  
dass er in Stücke schlug.”

_It fell out of my hands,  
And to pieces it was smashed._

Several more women, none of whose voices he recognizes, come in as the next and last verse begins.

“Draus sah ich Perlen rinnen  
und Tröpflein rosenrot…”

_From it I saw beads of liquid trickling,  
And tiny rose-red drops…_

As all the women in the chamber sing the final couplet, attendants and soldiers and Queen alike, Eren stands outside the door with the crown weighing heavily in his hands and softly mouths the familiar words:

“Was mag der Traum bedeuten?  
Ach, Liebste, bist du tot?”

_What might the dream mean?  
Oh, beloved, are you dead?_


End file.
